Analysis and simulation of scale-up potentials in reverse electrodialysis

AbstractThe reverse electrodialysis (RED) process has been widely accepted as a viable and promising technology to produce electric energy from salinity difference (salinity gradient power e.g. using river water/seawater or seawater and concentrated brines). Recent R&D efforts demonstrated how an appropriate design of the RED unit and a suitable selection of process conditions may crucially enhance the process performance. With this regard, a process simulator was developed and validated with experimental data collected on a laboratory-scale unit, providing a new modelling tool for process optimisation. In this work, performed within the REAPower project (www.reapower.eu), a process simulator previously proposed by the same authors has been modified in order to predict the behaviour of a cross-flow RED unit. The model was then adopted to investigate the influence of the most important variables (i.e. solution properties and stack geometry) on the overall process performance. In particular, the use of diff...

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